Nasdaq chair Adena Friedman believes tokenization could free up “tens of billions of dollars” of capital tied up as collateral in the global financial system. She said so on the sidelines of TOKEN2049 in Singapore, in an interview published by CNBC on October 9, according to Journal du Coin. According to the same source, she did not detail her calculation: this figure is a statement, not a measurement.
Collateral that sits idle when markets close
The starting point is an ordinary mechanism of market finance. Every day, banks and funds pledge securities to back their positions: this is collateral. According to the description reported by the source, Treasury bills, stocks and money market fund shares then remain locked up for hours, sometimes days.
The reason given lies in the market calendar. Markets close in the evening and on weekends; during these periods, assets posted as collateral cannot easily be moved or reallocated. It is this immobilization that the Nasdaq chair proposes to reduce.
What tokenization would change, according to Adena Friedman
Tokenizing means representing an asset as a digital token that can be transferred on a blockchain, at any hour and within minutes. Applied to both securities and money flows, the process would make collateral continuously available. “If you tokenize all of these instruments as well as the money flows, collateral becomes very fluid,” explains Adena Friedman, quoted by Journal du Coin.
She places the turning point at the adoption of the Genius Act, the U.S. law that has regulated stablecoins since July 2025. “If you can tokenize money, then you can tokenize capital flows,” she sums up. She adds that retail investors were “ten years ahead” of institutions in their demand for continuously open markets. These remarks are the analysis of the head of a stock exchange operator that has a direct interest in seeing this model prevail.
A timeline already underway
Alongside the statements, the source reports several dated facts. The SEC, the U.S. securities regulator, approved on March 18, 2026 a Nasdaq application filed in September 2025. It authorizes the settlement of certain securities in token form: Russell 1000 stocks and major index ETFs, traded in the same order book and at the same price as conventional securities.
Trading hours are changing too. Nasdaq is targeting December 6, 2026 to open an overnight session and extend its trading day to nearly 23 hours, five days out of seven. The regulator’s green light, granted in April, remains conditional on the dissemination of prices overnight. The operator has also invested $100 million in Kraken, a crypto-asset exchange platform.
On the post-trade infrastructure side, the central securities depository DTCC has enrolled more than 50 institutions for its tokenization service expected in October, including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. A Broadridge study published in July indicates that 84% of the 200 North American executives surveyed rank tokenization among their strategic priorities. This is a survey of intentions, which says nothing about the volumes actually tokenized.
What is still missing
The first obstacle concerns settlement. According to the source, the pilot project approved in March does not change the settlement period, which remains set at one business day (T+1), because the conversion into tokens only takes place after the fact.
The second has to do with how institutions are organized. Adena Friedman herself considers the exchange infrastructure to be “the easiest part” of the shift to 24-hour trading. Banks currently use closing hours to update their systems and recalculate their risks; without a break, everything would have to run “in real time, all the time.” Nasdaq is counting on artificial intelligence: its risk management platform incorporates digital agents that, for now, are limited to making recommendations.
Finally, the executive acknowledges that not all assets are liquid enough to trade day and night. As for the legal framework and interoperability between platforms, the source reports case-by-case authorizations from the U.S. regulator, but does not indicate how tokens issued on different infrastructures could move between them. This question remains open.
And the Swiss financial center?
The source article deals only with the U.S. market and mentions no Swiss players. The debate nonetheless raises a question for any financial center that holds large volumes of securities as collateral: what share of this collateral remains immobilized during closing hours, and under what conditions could a tokenized representation be mobilized continuously? The answer depends on elements the source does not address here: the currency in which settlement would be carried out, the legal recognition of tokens and the ability of existing infrastructures to operate without interruption.
The first concrete test announced has a date: on December 6, if overnight price dissemination is ready, U.S. stocks will trade nearly 23 hours a day on Nasdaq. This article does not constitute investment advice.
